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Canberra home to the highest quality of living worldwide, according to Numbeo data

29 July 2016 Clare Sibthorpe

Canberra's modest population has proven yet again that bigger is not always better, as the city has the highest quality of living worldwide.

That's according to numbeo.com, the world's largest database of user-generated content.

The research website ranked the Australian capital first on it's mid-year "quality of life" index, which takes into account purchasing power, pollution, house-price-to-income ratio, cost of living, safety, health care, traffic commute time and climate index.

It's the fifth time in the website's past seven six-monthly rankings that Canberra has finished first place.

It seems international flights between the Australian and New Zealand capitals will connect the world's two most liveable cities, with Wellington coming in second.

Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane also cracked the top ten, along with Edinburgh in the UK, Zurich in Switzerland, Vienna in Austria, Munich in Germany and Edmonton in Canada.

Numbeo gathers statistics from a range of sources, such as websites of supermarkets, taxi company websites, governmental institutions, newspaper articles and other surveys.

But it's not the only ranking in recent years to confirm Canberra is the best place to live.

In 2014, an OECD report found the city to be the top ranking "region" in terms of well-being worldwide.

This was based on access to broadband, education, income, jobs, environment, health, safety, housing and civic engagement.

A few months earlier, the agency released a smaller data set of eight measures, which also gave the territory a perfect score on crime, average household disposable income, and voter turnout, and the top Australian rating.

The ranking placed Canberra at 17 for students - up four spots from 21 last year and up 20 spots from 37th in 2014.

But the bush capital has shown you can't win them all.

Canberra came in 28th on this year's Worldwide Quality of Living survey, which ranks more than 200 cities against a range of political, social, economic, environmental, personal safety and public service criteria to help calculate remuneration packages for expatriate workers.

But the international human resources firm conducting it found Canberra could have ranked higher had it been connected by international flights at the time of the survey.

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